‘I’m Lily Savage, the blonde bombsite’ – the genius of Paul O’Grady, by Suzy Eddie Izzard, Russell T Davies and more
‘Granada wanted me to write his sitcom. But I wasn’t needed’
Russell T Davies, writer
In the mid-90s, I was a writer-for-hire at Granada TV, bashing out soaps, sitcoms, quizzes, anything. One day, they said: “Paul O’Grady, d’you know him? He’s Lily Savage. We want you to meet him. He wants to do a sitcom as Lily. And he needs a writer. I mean, he’s funny, OK. But he doesn’t know story or structure or characters or backstories. If he’s going to write proper scripts, we think he needs a writer.”
So off I went. A drab office in the ITV Tower. Paul walked in. Unexpectedly handsome. He sat down. He stared at me like the scan of a 3D printer. And then he began. “I think, scene one, I’m walking down the street, and there’s a Big Issue seller, and he says to me, ‘Big Issue?’, and I say, ‘It might be to you, but it’s not to me.’”
It never stopped. A glorious monologue, a mad, magical attack of words, conjuring whole worlds into existence, with jokes like daggers. Story? There were gorgeous, furious, heartfelt tales of love and loss, fags and booze, feuds and affairs, long-held grudges ending in spectacular punchlines. Structure? Everything came with an arc, a punch, a trick, a gasp. Characters?
